A fraud investigator falls in love with his suspect, though they may be closer than they think.

4.37GB | 1h 29m | 1280×546 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/83281352558C72C/Code.46.2003.720p.HDTV.x264-DON.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English,Czech

The post Michael Winterbottom – Code 46 (2003) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

This is a remake of Charade with Cary Grant and done with a few twists that make it interesting. A well to do couple in Paris are headed for divorce. The woman finds out her husband is dead before she gets the chance to ask for the divorce. She finds this out when she returns to their residence to find everything in it is gone. Two members of the French police are there and inform her of her husbands death. She encounters several people who want money stolen by her husband.

3.20GB | 1h 43m | 1280×542 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/499AF02A86DF112/The_Truth_About_Charlie_2002_720p_WEB-DL_DD5.1_H.264-alfaHD.mkv

Language:English,French,Arabic
Subtitles:Sv,En,Da,No,Fi,Fr,Ge,It,El,Es,Pt,Nl

The post Jonathan Demme – The Truth About Charlie (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Given Robert Altman’s fondness for working with ensemble casts, it comes as no surprise that his films often provide a shambolic cross-section of a particular institution or locale, whether the titular mobile army hospital of M*A*S*H, the indigenous country music scene in the great network narrative Nashville, or the intersecting lives of 20-odd Angelenos in 1993’s Short Cuts. For Short Cuts, Altman and co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt mashed together nine stories and a poem from “dirty realist” writer Raymond Carver, shifting their setting from Carver’s beloved Pacific Northwest to suburban Los Angeles—a place Altman clearly feels much more ambivalent about. The result is a shared cinematic space in which the various characters can carom off each other in unexpected ways. Discovering the unanticipated linkages between the storylines becomes one of the film’s frequent surface pleasures.

Altman famously gave his actors plenty of room for improvisation. This emphasis on behavioral naturalism—as well as his penchant for orchestrating overlapping dialogue—imbues his films with a down-to-earth, lived-in feeling. Carver’s stories are equally low-key: Typically, some random occurrence leads the protagonist not, as in James Joyce, to a hifalutin existential epiphany, but rather to a bittersweet moment of often ironic clarity. The biggest difference between Carver’s fiction and Altman’s film is that while the sexual and ethical tensions that are rife throughout the stories rarely come to the surface, they find collective and catastrophic catharsis in Short Cuts’s earthshaking finale.

Disaster is implicit from the start. The film’s opening shots follow helicopters as they spray sections of Los Angeles with pesticides to combat medfly infestation. For Altman, the city is quite literally a quarantine zone, a hazy megalopolis that’s still as insular and isolated as in his previous, Hollywood-skewering The Player. This introductory vignette, while considerably less flashy than the eight-minute tracking shot that opened the earlier film, similarly serves to delineate Altman’s extensive cast of characters: White-collar or working stiff, they’re almost always couples, and we invariably meet them just as they’re about to turn off onto one of those unexpected existential detours that lend the film its title. The only characters not plucked directly from Carver are jazz chanteuse Tess Trainer (Annie Ross) and her cellist daughter, Zoe (Lori Singer). While the pair has their own narrative downbeats to hit, their music functions as a kind of Greek chorus, bridging storylines and even supplying some mordant thematic counterpoint.

Altman described his approach to Short Cuts as “lifting the roof off” the characters’ homes and peering inside. Certainly there’s a wide vein of voyeurism running through the film. What’s more, Short Cuts maps out an intriguing psychological progression from looking to taking to destroying. When Honey (Lili Taylor) and Bill Bush (Robert Downey Jr.) agree to apartment-sit for a neighboring couple, their initial curiosity about the way other people live soon morphs into an aggressive takeover of their neighbors’ possessions. Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher) spies on his philandering wife (Frances McDormand) until he can gain access to their home in her absence and systematically take it apart piece by piece.

Another possibility exists: rather than objective demolition, an exchange of goods and services. Dr. Ralph Wyman (Matthew Modine) and his artist wife, Marian (Julianne Moore), set a dinner date with out-of-work Stuart (Fred Ward) and Claire Kane (Anne Archer), a professional clown. Because neither couple wants to be left alone with an inconvenient truth (adultery, the discovery of a dead body), their strained soiree soon devolves into a Felliniesque bacchanal, complete with clown paint, that teases the possibility of a partner swap. Picnicking in Griffith Park, Bill and his buddy, Jerry (Chris Penn), leave their wives behind to track down two teenyboppers on bikes. For Jerry, frustrated to the point of explosion with his wife’s at-home phone-sex franchise, Bill’s salacious shit talk takes on a lethal significance.

Altman’s Nashville concludes its scarily prescient examination of the nation’s emerging politico-entertainment coalition with a concert-cum-assassination. Short Cuts seems at first blush to lack such an eminently logical endpoint. But Altman and Barhydt hit upon one of the archetypal Angeleno obsessions: waiting for “the big one,” the cataclysmic seismic shift that will cleave California cleanly from the continent. What happens at the end of Short Cuts isn’t quite as apocalyptic as all that; nevertheless, it allows the characters to register their idiosyncratic responses to an extremely clear intimation of mortality. Suffice it to say, not all of them react with the same élan as Earl and Doreen Piggott (Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin), huddled helplessly in their double-wide’s doorway, pledging to ride out the end of the world together.

3.39GB | 3h 08m | 1024×432 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/31D82B645C692DB/Robert_Altman_-_(1993)_Short_Cuts.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Robert Altman – Robert Altman – Short Cuts (1993) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

The Player is a 1992 satirical film directed by Robert Altman from a screenplay by Michael Tolkin based on his own novel of the same name. It is the story of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a Hollywood studio executive who gets away with murdering a wannabe screenwriter who Mill believes is sending him death threats.
The film, loaded with movie references and Hollywood insider jokes, is a critique of the Hollywood movie business, which treats artists poorly and sacrifices quality for commercial success. It might seem surprising that around sixty big Hollywood names agreed to play cameos as themselves in the film, but Altman himself admits that “it is a very mild satire” and it offended no one.[1]
Altman had trouble with the Hollywood studio system in the 1970s after a number of studio films lost money or had trouble finding audiences. The Player was his comeback to making films in Hollywood. The film, and its cast and crew, won a number of awards and nominations. A TV spin-off was created and a pilot shot in 1997. However, the pilot was never picked up.
Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) is a Hollywood producer with a studio executive girlfriend Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson). Mill’s job is to hear story pitches from screenwriters and decide which films have the potential to get made and which films get rejected; 12 out of about 50,000 submisions he claims. His job is suddenly in danger, though, when up-and-comer Larry Levi (Peter Gallagher) begins work at the studio. Rumors swirl that Griffin may be replaced soon by Levi. Griffin has also been receiving threatening postcards, assumed to be from a disgruntled screenwriter whose pitch he rejected.
Mill delves through records and surmises that the disgruntled writer is David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio), who had previously pitched a script to him. Griffin lurks around Kahane’s home and is told by a woman, June (Greta Scacchi), who he watches while talking to her on the phone, that Kahane is at a movie theatre watching The Bicycle Thief. Griffin goes to the theatre in Pasadena and offers Kahane a scriptwriting deal, hoping this will stop the threats. However, Kahane gets intoxicated in a Japanese resteraunt and rebuffs Griffin’s offer; he points out that Mill came in for only the last five minutes of The Bicycle Thief, and denies responsibility for sending Griffin any postcards. Kahane pushes Griffin in the parking lot and the two men scuffle. In a rage, Griffin accidentally kills Kahane. Thinking fast, Griffin makes the death look like a robbery gone wrong.
The next day at work, he receives another postcard, confirming that his stalking writer is still at large. Griffin attends Kahane’s funeral and gets along with June, Kahane’s girlfriend; she knows none of the other mourners. Studio chief of security Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) confronts Griffin about the murder and says that Pasadena Police know Griffin was the last one to see Kahane alive. Pasadena detectives Susan Avery (Whoopi Goldberg) and DeLongpre (Lyle Lovett) suspect that Griffin is guilty of murder. They question him and DeLongpre starts to keep an eye on Griffin. The stalking writer leaves a rattlesnake in Griffin’s Range Rover, causing a near-death experience that makes Griffin realize how he has sudden and deep feelings for June. With his girlfriend Bonnie over in New York, Griffin takes June to a Hollywood awards banquet and their relationship blooms.
Meanwhile, with Levi ever encroaching on his job, Griffin sees an opportunity to save his position. He hears a pitch idea from two writers about a film called Habeas Corpus, pitched to feature talent rather than stars, and instantly recognizes huge problems with the downbeat story. However, he manages to convince Levi that the scenario is good and the movie will be a guaranteed Oscar contender. Griffin plans to let Levi shepherd the film through production and have it flop miserably. Then Griffin will step in at the last moment and suggest some basic changes to salvage the film’s box office potential, letting him reclaim his position at the studio. The Pasadena detectives call Griffin in for a lineup after a witness to Kahane’s death comes forward. Griffin gains a reprieve when the witness identifies the wrong man, Detective DeLongpre, who was placed in the lineup with the other suspects.
One year later, studio power players are watching the end of Habeas Corpus with its tacked-on upbeat ending. Griffin’s plan to “save” the movie worked like a charm and he is now a studio executive. Bonnie objects to the crass nature of the changes and is promptly fired, a decision Mill does not overule. While driving home, he receives a pitch over the phone from a man who reveals himself as the postcard writer. The man pitches an idea about a studio executive who kills a writer and gets away with murder. Griffin recognizes the pitch as blackmail and immediately agrees to give the writer a deal. The writer’s title for the film is The Player. The movie ends by showing that June is now Griffin’s wife and heavily pregnant with his child.

+Commentary

2.72GB | 2h 04m | 1024×556 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/A7455204C0BF09E/Robert_Altman_-_(1992)_The_Player.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Robert Altman – The Player (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Five Corners is a powerful, moody ensemble piece with an impressively heavyweight cast. Although the basic story of the film causes it to veer off from serious drama into melodrama, it manages to pack quite a punch, thanks to some tautly-written individual sequences, acutely observed characters and deft direction. John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay is not always successful at mixing the quirkily amusing segments with those of a more disturbing or frightening bent, but the individual moments work so well that the viewer tends to overlook the lapses. Working from the script’s strengths, Tony Bill’s direction finds abundant humor as well as almost unbearable tension. His work on the elevator sequence is especially good, finding unexpected visual beauty in the image of the shafts while simultaneously creating apprehension at the danger involved in the “game” being played. His direction is also noteworthy in the penguin scene and the lengthy climactic chase. Jodie Foster gives a lovely, understated performance, quietly but eloquently conveying the character’s desperation, frustration and determination, and contrasting effectively with John Turturro’s disquieting psychopath. Tim Robbins displays a gentle strength and is especially good in his diner scene, while Kathleen Chalfont is memorable in a small role. Robbins would hit it big the next year with Bull Durham, at the same time that Foster would earn recognition (as an adult actress) with The Accused. ~ Craig Butler, All Movie Guide

Five.Corners.1987.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 30mn
Size:	1.21 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	720x576 ~> 1024x576
Aspect ratio:	16:9
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 633 Kbps
Audio
English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/171767C4955FF87/Five.Corners.1987.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Tony Bill – Five Corners (1987) first appeared on Cinema of the World.